There is definitely a sense of community here based on me lurking for about a week and the number of apps being developed, but at the moment I don’t think any have done a great job at attracting ordinary people outside of reddit migrators. To be fair, this is a really difficult problem, and I’m not even sure if there is a good solution that wouldn’t involve changing common terms about the fediverse works. Where it gets really weird is when federation allows me to interact with Mastodon content on a completely separate platform, and I can’t imagine an average user just understanding that immediately.
Of course, this also involves a change in some UX patterns in existing apps. For instance, I have to hit the “Add comment” button on Kbin in order to see how this comment will look in reality. While this editor that I’m typing in has the ability to bold text, it just wraps what I’m typing in the actual bold markdown tag. This is fine for technical users, but to an ordinary person this doesn’t make any sense, especially when other apps already give you a WYSIWYG experience. Granted, this of course is not an easy thing to implement either, but I think it’s necessary for winning over non-technical users.
Right now, it feels like a lot of apps (at least on iOS) are creating an “Apollo for Lemmy/Kbin” type of experience, and that’s great in its own right as all of these apps feel very intuitive considering the platform’s age. However, especially with Kbin’s microblogging feature in mind, we should try to differ from Apollo while still using aspects of it like its swipe actions and the amount of customization it gives. Otherwise we inherit many of Apollo’s flaws (that may be even worse on fundamentally different platform), which is what led to others using apps like Narwhal or even the official Reddit app.
TLDR: In general the initial direction seems good (especially with the many good apps being developed), but the next biggest hurdle is becoming mainstream and that requires intuitive UIs to attract ordinary people. We don’t get good and diverse content otherwise.
I’ve been on lemmy mostly since it’s a bit more mature particularly in mobile usage, however I think kbin overall has more potential once it matures a bit more since it has more interesting functionality (Microblogs, Magazine CSS, etc.). This functionality could lead to some interesting UI/UX paradigms, which IMO would be a bit of a breath of fresh air in the mobile space over the good amount of “apollo-inspired” lemmy apps. The apollo approach is good for lemmy apps, but I see kbin as being something more diverse and as such would necessitate a different approach. Though I think the most important thing long-term for kbin is for it to improve its federation, without that it becomes a jack-of-all-trades master-of-none platform.